P R O G R A M M I N GThe Game Maker's Companion
by Jacob Habgood, Nana Nielsen, Kevin Crossley, Martin Rijks , posted 12/10/10This book excerpt contains the first chapter of the book that introduces beginning game developers to the Game Maker program

M U S I C A N D S O U N DInterview with Firelight Technologies
by Nathan Madsen, posted 11/19/10We talk to the makers of FMOD about their current successes, new partnerships and what they have lined up for 2011 and GDC

At 1PM GMT (8AM EST) on Friday 1/7 we will be preventing further updates to www.gamedev.net and the site will be put into a largely read-only state. At that time we will begin the process of migrating the site over to the new software and server. We are still working out some of the details but we'll be doing our best to keep as much of GameDev.net online during the migration process. This process may take quite a while, definitely over the course of the weekend at least, so please check here throughout this time for updates as this process goes on.

Once the migration is completed, the current site will become archive.gamedev.net for an undetermined period of time (at least 30 days). During this time the new website will become www.gamedev.net and will be open for use and (most importantly) feedback.

Please be aware that the new website is being launched at a stage where not all decisions regarding content and layout have been made, and we are doing so in order to make those decisions based upon the feedback generated by our community. We want you to have a hand in helping us finalize the next generation of GameDev.net.

All of us on the Staff and Mods team are very excited, and we look forward to working closely with you all in the coming weeks and months as GameDev.net continues to be the #1 resource for game development!

The enhanced performance and natural feel of the Wacom Cintiq interactive pen display helped to decrease character development time of Naughty Dog's incredibly popular games, "Uncharted" and "Uncharted 2."

The Linderdaum Engine is an open source purely object-oriented 3D gaming engine written in C++ with full support of OpenGL 3.2 Core Profile and OpenGL Shading Language. This release includes Asteroids demo and other samples, showing how to use the engine to build a game from scratch.

The sample code for the OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide is now available for WebGL and Android and has also been updated to build for iOS 4.2 SDK. Live versions of the WebGL samples can be viewed at OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide website (www.opengles-book.com). The source code for the samples has been moved to Google Code at code.google.com/p/opengles-book-samples.

The new version 0.9.4-R1 of the open-source, cross-platform 3D application framework PixelLight has been released.

This is primarily a maintenance release with focus on improving the general performance, realizing minor refactoring steps towards PixelLight version 1.0, performing the usual bugfixing as well as integrating user feedback.

I'm back for the end of this week; Trent and I swapped Dailies this week so now I get to pull from a huge body of news and he got to piece together what happened over the weekend into a cohesive narrative. Without further adieu, let's take a look at what happened so far this week in the game industry.

What really interested me this time at CES was NVidia and Microsoft announcing that Windows is going ARM in a big way; NVidia will be providing a set of awesome CPU/GPU chipsets (with instruction-level GPGPU for vector processing!) and Microsoft will presumably be providing the tools, applications and OSes. Get ready to see a ton of jobs appearing to port legacy software from x86 to MSIL/ARM, though I'd be surprised if they don't have any emulation/dynamic-translation layer ready to go for backwards compatibility. It's definitely good news for teams that have taken the time to convert their ancient legacy code to .NET; their changeover will hopefully be as painless as possible.

Also at CES, Intel did a bunch of talking about their second-generation i7 chip setup, Sandy Bridge, which will offer integrated graphics technology. Remember Larrabee? This seems a lot better than that. Valve was on hand to point out how awesome it is.

HELLO GAMEDEV.NET. And happy new year! I'm going to be busy on Thursday, so you get to see me bright and early this fine Monday morning. I, for one, am looking forward to getting back to work as too many days off and I get antsy. And since last week was, largely, a quiet week in the industry, we'll be off to a slow start here.

Proving that the Japanese game market is completely different than it is elsewhere, Pokemon Black/Pokemon White and Monster Hunter Portable 3rd led game sales for 2010 in Japan (and the PSP led oversall system sales). I'm actually incredibly excited for both of these games, as I've always liked playing the occasional Pokemon title and Monster Hunter is purely amazing. I'm also looking forward to The Third Birthday (Parasite Eve 3) for PSP, which should be coming out in the US... At some point.

Since there's little in the way of news and I just got off a twelve hour binge of three days with it (and I would add it to my favorites of 2010 list had I played it last year), if you haven't given Nier a fair shake, you should probably do that. It's, without question, the most fun I've had with an action/RPG in... Ever, maybe, actually. Things of note: floating arcane books, integrated text adventures, a boar you can drift on, giant swords, and a dungeon based on the mansion and events from the first Resident Evil game. It's so good.

Congratulations on surviving Christmas so far! Provided you can still move and haven't loaded yourself too far down with holiday feasts, you're well on your way to enjoying a happy new year as well (as opposed to being pinned down by your ever-expanding gut as wolves bay in the background). I asked Santa for the new GDNet site software, and it looks like he has delivered.

Humble Indie Bundle 2 has finished its sales run, netting over $1.8 million USD. At one point, to make things better, they included the first Humble Indie Bundle when you bought the second one as well.

Steam is still having a huge amount of holiday sales, having had ridiculous prices like $5 Torchlight and a $10 FEAR bundle. New daily deals are showing up every day - the next ones are in just under an hour from the time of this posting.

Here's an interesting 96-page manual on how to use the PXTone program to make amazing videogame music. It's pretty handy, because the official PXTone manual is in Japanese.

Obviously there's not a huge amount of news since everyone has been on vacation, so feel free to make your own news in the comments. What did you get? What did you buy yourself in the Boxing Day sales?

Happy Holidays everyone! 2011 should be a very exciting year for both the users and staff of GameDev.net as we move forward with a brand new GDNet. Virtually everything will be overhauled in order to streamline our ability to provide the very best in game development news, articles, and interaction with your fellow developers. Read on for sneak peak of our new upcoming site..

After the success of the first seven entries to the ShaderX book series, of GPU Pro (gpupro.blogspot.com) and the soon to be released GPU Pro 2 (gpupro2.blogspot.com), we are looking for authors for GPU Pro 3.

The upcoming book will cover advanced rendering techniques that run on the DirectX or OpenGL run-times, or any other run-time with any language available. It will include topics on: Geometry Manipulation; Rendering Techniques; Handheld Devices Programming; Effects in Image Space; Shadows; 3D Engine Design; Graphics Related Tools; Environmental Effects and a dedicated section on General Purpose GPU Programming that will cover CUDA, DirectCompute and OpenCL examples.

Proposals are due by March 17th, 2011. Please send them to wolf at shaderx.com. An example proposal, writing guidelines and a FAQ can be downloaded from gpupro3.blogspot.com.

Good morning, US of A - it's me again. As I get ready to tuck myself in over here in Taiwan you get to wake up to another Daily dose of newsy goodness. By the by, if you'd like a glimpse into what it takes to get an international-level fireworks show up and running, then swing by my blog for daily updates. Game developers may have ended their holiday crunch period, but mine is now just beginning! Oh and happy Christmas Eve Eve.

Litigation updates: Harmonix vs. Viacom, Activision vs. EA. Hey what's happened to holiday cheer these days huh? Some people just can't wait for the new year to get their lawsuit on apparently. Viacom has issued a response to ex-shareholder claims I covered on Tuesday - unsurprisingly they have gone and foisted the blame back on the ex-shareholders. Meanwhile Activision has decided to rope EA into its long-running spat between it and former Infinity Ward heads and demanding $400 million. In response, EA says (in part) "This is a PR play filled with pettiness and deliberate misdirection." And a Merry Christmas to you all too!

Gamebryo succeeds in finding buyer, Torque hints at success. Further updates to two previous stories. Last month both middleware companies Gamebryo and Torque announced they were up for sale, and just yesterday Gamebryo was finally able to announce their buyer, long-time partner Gamebase. More potentially good news could be coming from Torque early next year, as the company's director Eric Preisz was able to reveal that they are "no longer entertaining buyers at this time." What remains to be seen however is whether this means Torque has found a buyer, or is pursuing some alternate course of action. Either way, Preisz also says "The future looks bright."

Australia ratings to get complete review early 2011. The recent attention given to the R18+ mature game rating has given Australia's government reason to re-evaluate rating classification guidelines for all media in the country. Included in this review will be further discussion on the yet-again delayed R18+ decision.

Daily Remainders - more cool stories that didn't make the cut along with game dev articles/features.

Matali Physics 1.1 engine and Matali Physics Pro 1.1 engine has been released. The latest versions add further optimizations of engine memory management and performance for all supported platforms, especially for Xbox 360, Windows Phone 7 and iOS.
Together with this release we introduced more than 30% reduction in prices of commercial licences!

A Luxology press release announcing the immediate availability of modo 501, the latest version of the company's award-winning 3D content creation software for artists in a variety of disciplines including media and entertainment, game development, engineering and architectural design visualization, and CGI for print.

messiahStudio5 is a culmination of more than a years worth of user suggested ideas and improvements. We've added a new Interactive renderer, that we call Dynamic Render, which shows you fully rendered images of your scene as you make changes to it; fully multithreaded, complete with anti-aliasing and controls to adjust resolution and quality.

So Promit's all like "I can't really do the Daily any more for right now bro" and I'm all like "No problem, dude, I got this." and he's like "Really?" and I'm like "Totally!" And then I go to check my starred GReader stories and find... ten. Wait wait wait, I say - it's just my stupid hotel internet crapping out on me and only loading ten items. So I refresh the page. Still ten. Maybe said crappy internet failed to tell Google to save a lot of the stories I starred during the last week. That might be it. Or it's just everyone taking off for the holidays. Whichever - Slow News Tuesday begins... now.

Board and card games allowed for 3rd Global Game Jam. Things are starting to really get rolling for the 3rd annual Global Game Jam, in which various locations around the world host developers for a weekend to bang out a game. The last two years have been increasingly successful, with close to 900 games created last year alone by 4,300 participants at 125 sites in 37 different countries. Now to increase the number even more this year they are opening up submissions to board and card games as well. Get ready to get your jam on next month!

Nuovo finalists revealed for 2011 IGFs. Created to highlight innovative new games, the Nuovo Award has shed some light on very interesting game projects, and that will continue in 2011 with these 8 finalists

Harmonix suing former parent Viacom. Trouble is brewing between Rock Band creator Harmonix and their former parent company Viacom, which recently put the company up for sale. Now former shareholders are alleging that Viacom is trying to avoid bonus payments by "manipulating costs". We'll see where this goes and how it affects the sale of the studio, if anywhere or at all.

Daily Remainders - more cool stories that didn't make the cut along with game dev articles/features.

It's time for your Christmas Week Monday Daily. If you haven't gone out and bought gifts for your loved ones yet, there's still time! I hope. News will be a little soft this week, but that's to be expected since nobody is actually working.

A lot of people are really bad at relating to other human beings in the latest Bulletstorm trailer. I believe it's actually impossible to create a more hostile work environment, even without the explosions. Hello, HR?

Blizzard is indeed working on another MMO. This should surprise no-one, and make their bank rub their hands together with glee.

Favimon is a pretty weird freakin' game. Google is pretty vicious; not even the combined might of GameDev.net can defeat it!

Before you go today, you might want to check out the full-on Derezzed music video from Daft Punk for the new Tron film. Jousting is hard.

This release includes many additions, improvements and bug fixes for all four iAuxSoft engines. Besides that, the support for webOS Palm/HP is coming that will enable iAuxSoft middleware for all major mobile platforms: iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and webOS Palm/HP.

And here we have it, the last Trent Polack-written GameDev.net Daily of the year two-thousand and ten. I'm not going to lie, it's probably going to be a let down. I'm tired, you see. Very a little bit kind of tired and I haven't played any video games -- outside of the one I'm making for a job -- all week. This means I'm, basically, just a shell of a human being.

The Mac App Store is slated to launch on January 6, 2011. Given the effect that the App Store has had on the ease and popularity of application and game purchases on iOS-driven devices, I'm very curious to see how the Mac App Store affects application/game sales on OS X. I may have to look into submitting a game or two to the App Store as well. Maybe I can charge a penny for them. And sell A MILLION DIGITAL UNITS OF MY GAME. I think that would be neat. I could use money!

Speaking of iOS, Epic released the iOS-compatible beta of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) yesterday. I think the claim of "NEXT GENERATION MOBILE GRAPHICS" claim in the trailer means the phrase "next generation" has officially reached the point of being completely meaningless but, that aside, the trailer does paint a very nice picture for mobile game development. The tools alone are impressive (as they always are as far as Unreal Engine 3 is concerned), but, yeah, the capabilities of the engine on iOS-built devices is pretty incredible. I'm interested to see what people end up doing with it.

I would really like to be playing Need for Speed Shift 2: Unleashed absolutely immediately. The game is actually called Shift 2: Unleashed and just uses the Need for Speed logo, which confuses me (as Shift, if I recall correctly, did very well commercially and critically), but regardless: I want it very much.

Also, Deus Ex: Human Revolution was delayed for reasons of "polish." That is polish as in spiffy presentation, not my people. The game is now expected to be released sometime between April 2011 and March 2012 (Ubisoft's next fiscal year).

Since I won't see you folks for another few weeks: have a happy holiday season and a jolly ol' drunken new year!

Greetings from Taipei! It's currently 10:19pm here but if I were back home it would only be 9:19am. So you all in the US get an early Daily today while the rest of you also get a Daily that's actually posted on the day I'm supposed to post it. How wonderful! I need to be out helping to unload & coordinate show product at 7:30am tomorrow so let's make this quick because I got maybe 5 hours of sleep in the 24 hours or so it took me to get here.

Studio news: Square Enix, Sensory Sweep, Monumental, Tequila Works. It looks like Square Enix banked a lot on Final Fantasy XIV being a smash hit, because the very rocky launch the game has undergone so far has forced the company to cut their profit estimates by a whopping 91%. This has had a ripple effect on several of its titles still under development, delaying the releases of both FFXIV for PS3 and the hotly-anticipated Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Things are looking no better for the former president of Sensory Sweep, which was a story I covered several months ago and is also something that has been discussed in the forums. The studio founder, David Rushton, is now facing possible jail time for fraud and racketeering as well as owing as much as US$516,819 in restitution. Better news for Monumental, however, as they have managed to retain staff through their most recent restructuring, which includes entering administration while they finalize financing to keep Monumental Games Group trading. Finally, check out a new Spanish studio, Tequila Works.

Australian R18+ rating gets hung up again. Things seemed to be looking up for the Australian R18+ ratings movement until this past week when the Attorney Generals decided to postpone their decision - and not giving any indication as to when they would pass a final verdict. This, despite the huge support showed by the Australian gaming community, is yet one more disappointment in a long string ever since this issue began to pick up speed earlier this year. Now there's even talk of doing away with the MA15+ rating, however thankfully that seems to only be the case if the R18+ rating is approved - otherwise Aussies would be stuck with games rated M and under.

triangle Games Conference renamed, rescoped. I went to the Triangle Games Conference this year and it was a blast meeting all the devs in the Raleigh/Durham area - they have a sweet dev community down there. Well next year they are expanding their scope and are calling it the East Coast Game Conference. The call for submissions is now out as well.

Daily Remainders - more cool stories that didn't make the cut along with game dev articles/features.

Hey all, it's time for another exciting week of the GDNet Daily. This week, we're going to get down and dirty and explore an abandoned Incan mine. Then, I'll fly off to Chicago to shear a sheep on top of the Sears Tower. Please watch the commercials. Please, please, please watch the commercials.

Is Epic's crack-rock of iPhone graphics goodness Infinity Blade poised to stab Angry Birds in the back and take over its mantle as the game your grandmother keeps playing when you look away from her for two seconds? Nope. But it's still selling a whole load of copies very quickly.

Remember Octodad, back when I posted about it a few weeks ago? Well, there's an interview posted with the game's creators. I was wondering what kind of breakfasts they have in order to produce this third-cephalopod shooter. Nobody even thought to ask.